Challenging concepts to block

[Josh Caldwell]

Blockly is pretty good with basic sequential code, but I'm curious about programming concepts and paradigms that harder to represent. I'm thinking of things like:

• Object-oriented concepts (e.g., inheritance, polymorphism)
• Complex data structures
• Asynchronous operations
• Functional programming (ask me about algebraic blockly...)

How do you tackle teaching these more abstract ideas within a block-based environment? Do you use analogies, supplementary materials, or have you found clever ways to represent them with custom blocks?

[Mark Friedman]

Re asynchronous operations, it might be worth taking a look at these slides from a past Blockly Summit. 

Re functional programming, here's another presentation from another Blockly Summit.

-Mark